Kid racks up almost $6,000 on Jurassic World in-app purchases

Aside from a few big developers, no-one much likes in-app purchases, which have long been used to ruin mobile gaming on iOS.

However, the parents of 7-year-old Faisall Shugaa probably like them less than most — after their son racked up almost $6,000 in IAP bills, including $2,200 spent in just one hour.

According to the news story, Faisall spent the money upgrading dinosaurs on the iPad game Jurassic World. 32-year-old father Mohamed Shugaa didn’t realize what had happened until he ran into credit card problems and phoned his bank.

His son claimed to not be aware of the fact that he was spending real money, but Mohamed thinks Apple should have taken precautions to stop this from happening.

“Why wasn’t it flagged up?” he said. “It must look like there’s a glitch in the system because there’s no way in the world that much could be spent in one day.”

Although Apple did agree to refund him, he was further angered by the fact that he was asked to wait ten days to receive his refund. “£4,000 to Apple is just a drop in the ocean,” he said. “If they have [a] proper finance team surely they can refund it to my account.”

This isn’t the first time Apple has been taken to task for this kind of thing. In response it has previously added a tutorial on setting up parental controls inside the App Store, while also changing the wording for freemium games in the App Store from “free” to “get” on the download screen.

Do you sympathize with Mohamed Shugaa? While no parent wants to discover their kid maxed out the credit card upgrading dinosaurs to the tune of $6,000, shouldn’t it ultimately be down to parents to monitor what it is that their kids are doing? Leave your comments below.